Month: October 2017

Sorry for being late and a bit rushed, but yesterday was not the best of days. (If you haven’t been following my twitter feed, we had a pet in surgery.) Still, I managed to cover most shows to some degree.

So let’s jump right in and talk about this week’s shows! Be sure and let me know what you think down in the comments!

And here we are for this week’s edition of Worth Reading… Sorry it’s a bit late, forgot we had to take two of the girls to the vet yesterday afternoon, then didn’t feel well when we got home. (Then went to bed early and got up gawdawful early all slept out… and am now finishing this up pre-dawn.)

Last week, I posted a link from Remy where he pondered things that might cause you quickly drop an anime. This week, Chris at Peach’s Almanac looks at the same question from the opposite angle. In the Art of First Episodes, he talks about the various techniques used in first episodes to hook the viewer.

Speaking of Remy, he’s been on quite the roll the last couple of weeks. This week, he asks a question that never occurred to me: Dessert First or Last? That is, what order to you watch a day’s anime? (Be sure and check out the comments.) Me, it varies… Sometimes light to get ready for heavy, sometimes heavy then light to recover.

Fandom and obsession oft go hand-in-hand, and that leads Kausus of Otaku Gamer Zone to ask: At what point do we become too invested? It’s all too easy to slide down that slope, and sometimes difficult to find a balance.

And finally sometimes serendipity happens… A few days ago, this video popped up in the “Watch It Again” section of my YouTube homepage:

Which prompted me to post this tweet (kinda sad that nobody agreed with me, but whatever):

Then the very next day, Doteco at Ani-Dotes publishes an interesting piece as part of undertaking the 100 Day Anime Challenge: How ‘Tabi no Tochuu’ Embodies the Soul of Spice and Wolf. As a side note, I keep thinking I might take on one of those challenges, but I need another project like I need another hole in my head.

As a final note, next week is going to ‘interesting‘, but not in a good way. We’d taken Miss Emma to the vet to get a lump checked out (a lump that had doubled in size in the few days between discovering it and getting to our vet)… and it turns out that it’s likely cancerous. She’s a good candidate for surgery, and so she’s going in on Wednesday to have it removed. Of course that’s the day my weekly post is due, but I don’t know how much concentration I’ll have… Please bear with me.

Wow… it’s been a busy two weeks with all the finales and premieres. But things are generally returning to an even keel, and so I present this week’s edition of Worth Reading.

This writing thing isn’t always easy. Even good shows can be hard to write about – back in the Spring season, it was so hard to find something to say about Tsuki Ga Kirei that didn’t boil down to “so sweet, so good, so sweet”. Karandi at 100 Words Anime addresses these problems with from the point of view of writing series reviews in Reviewing Mediocre Anime.

Pasta at Plain Pasta and Plain Rice posted an update to his Anime Tracker Comparison. MAL seems to be the most popular and practically the default, but it’s far from the only service out there and his comparisons tell you a lot about the good and the bad of each service. Personally, I stumbled onto Anime Planet (link goes to my profile) early on and haven’t seen anything to convince me to switch.

Dave at Slow Anime presents an interesting take on the potential American adaptation of the insanely popular (and deservedly so) Your Name. (The announcement of which produced an enormous tempest-in-a-teapot on Twitter.)

Remy at The Lily Garden posted an interesting and timely essay – What Makes You Instantly Drop an Anime Series? Instant drops (partial episode drops) are so rare for me that it’s hard to make generalizations about causes. I think most of them are cases where the show is just egregiously bad or cringe-y. First episode drops… there’s a variety of potential causes, but most of them boil down to “this pisses me off or annoys me” or “my time is too valuable to watch this sh*t”. A significant percentage of my first ep drops are basically shows that I don’t necessarily dislike, but which I never manage to find the time, energy, or motivation to watch the remaining episodes of.

Then there’s also the (in)famous Three Ep Rule and the (unique to me I think) Mid-Season Gut Check… But those are topics for another time or maybe down in the comments.

I found Marthaurion‘s post on picking and choosing blog post formats pretty interesting, mostly because I’ve never really thought about it. I don’t think my style is a fixed one, I just sit down and let fly with whatever seems to work that week for that episode… Maybe I should think about it and try for a more consistent style.

And last but not least… ANN has released it’s Streaming Reviews Schedule for this season. Not gonna lie, I read a lot of other reviews, blogs, and forum posts when I’m working on my weekly writeups. Partly for inspiration, partly because I often do my best work when I have somebody to react to. What I never do is read in advance of watching an episode of a series I’m watching. I don’t mind having my perceptions altered afterwards, but I refuse to allow others to direct and control my experience. I specify “series I’m watching” because sometimes those writeups lead me to discover series that I wasn’t going to watch or I thought I wouldn’t like.

Hmm… More editorial comment this week than usual. But actually, I’m liking this format because it lets me talk about things that don’t fit in my episodic review post or which aren’t big enough (or my thoughts aren’t complete enough) to warrant a feature post of their own.

Anyhow, let me know what you think down in the comments. And don’t forget to like or comment on the posts you visit!

The just premiered anime Just Because! features Ena, whose hobby is photography… and her character and the photography details the anime’s staff put into the show caught my eye. (As I’m an enthusiastic and experienced amateur photographer.)

A new series in which I talk about photography and photographers in anime. I hope both photographers and anime fans find it useful and interesting.

Originally, this was part of my first impression post for Just Because… But it got to be very long and very nerdy and made more sense standalone because of the potential for a series of such posts. Plus, having spent over three hours researching, thinking, and writing it deserves the spotlight on its own.

Doesn’t it seem odd to have multiple parts of final thoughts? To me finality implies a definite ending. But it’s a necessity to keep the post length down and get some content out. Some shows are easy peasy to wrap up, others not so much. Today, I’m going to tackle the easy ones.